Obsession, Obsessively Told: A Review of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

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What if… What if you were an anonymous urbanite, going about your daily routine in, say, London, when some indescribable airborne object falls through the nothingness and crash-lands on your head, forever altering your somethingness…

What if that happened, and then it’s months later. You’ve doubled back from the abyss and there you are, at home, relearning everything. Physically you’re fine, but there’s a gaping hole where your sense of connection used to be. A piece of the puzzle is missing and with it your own sense of reality. You wish you could piece together some sense of your previous self because only then, you think, you’d be complete. Occasionally you brush up against that reality – a scrap of paper, a passing word – something to tease you, to trigger the connection with your past, with your self.

And then the money. You learn that your bank balance has shot through the stratosphere, the result of a settlement from the perpetrators of your condition. And now, as they say, money is no object.

You think long and hard and you decide that the best use for your magical millions is to attempt to regain your reality – to rebuild, in every way, and by any means necessary, your vaguely-remembered life. This is the ultra-high concept of Tom McCarthy’s meticulously plotted and crafted Remainder.

A rational search through memory doesn’t work so our hero opts for the irrational. A memory shake-up. Everything in his past would have left a mark of some sort – some kind of footprint. So he sets out to trigger these marks randomly. Though consciously implementing a random search cancels out its randomness.

Eventually, he plots the few vague or triggered memories that he has and tries to rebuild his surroundings around them so that every step within this recreated environment would trigger his sense of whole. So he buys an apartment building that resembles the one in his memory, and then the surrounding buildings, alters them to match the half-remembered images in his mind. Then he auditions actors to populate his new/old world. These players would be there for him around the clock to repeatedly enact the triggered memories.

You’d think all of this would be implausible, but the rendering is so painstakingly detailed that every time you think, “but what about…?”, you find that McCarthy is one step ahead of you. He’s already worked out the logical leaps. And once you wrap your mind around the notion that money can buy any service, somehow the improbable becomes possible.

Our hero isn’t the most likable of heroes, and more than once I became frustrated with his obsessive, often cruel, perfectionism. But then I remember that every supporting character is on his payroll. Everyone – his long-suffering facilitators, his “actors” – they all knew what they were getting into, at first at least, and are handsomely compensated.

And just how perfect does his recreated environment need to be? Partial success is abject failure. The point for him is to capture the connection, not merely an acceptable re-enactment. And once captured, it must be repeated. Realness is a state, not an isolated action. To experience it, our narrator must return to it again and again. It is only in the constant repetition of a remembered action that he finds the connection that he seeks.

And until when? As the story progresses, you realize that our hero needs to do more than just re-enact his environment over and over again. He reaches a point in his obsession where he must merge with his action, slow down the motion and be one with his environment, with the increasingly hyper-real experiences that he’s manufacturing. Only then will he feel complete.

Along with memory gaps, words and concepts have disappeared from our narrator’s verbal toolbox. And so we also get a complete sense of narrative process. Like the Tourette’s-affected hero of Jonathan Lethem’sMotherless Brooklyn, we’re privy to the machinations and linguistic somersaults that our narrator goes through to make himself understood.

A story of obsession, then, obsessively told. A meticulously rendered tale of meticulousness itself. It’s hard not to feel simultaneously irritated at both the action and the narrator, and yet utterly compelled to see his obsession through.

Andrew Saikali
is a writer in Toronto, Canada, and passes his days as a copy editor with The Globe and Mail. He spends his moments of leisure listening to music, reading, watching films and prowling the streets of Toronto, and he feels that he is long-overdue for a vacation so that he can do more of those things. At any given time, he is probably pining for distant shores and really should do more traveling and less pining.

Kevin Barry's new collection of stories, Dark Lies the Island, shares the virtues that made his debut novel, City of Bohane, such an astonishment. There is rich music, high humor and deep blackness on every page.

Most biographies of great artists get a little boring once the central figure becomes famous. The point of reading an artist’s biography, beyond the mere gossip factor, is to learn how that book or that song or that painting that you love came to be, and so often the answer lies in the artist’s struggle to forge beauty out of the miseries of his or her childhood and early adulthood. Typically, once the artist has spun his or her particular straw into gold, the rest is a page-filling mush of award ceremonies and meetings with other famous people — or in the sadder cases, a downward spiral into madness, drug addiction, and a lonely death.

The opposite is true of Peter Ames Carlin’sBruce, the new authorized biography of rock icon Bruce Springsteen. The early pages of Carlin’s book, focusing on Springsteen’s hardscrabble childhood in Freehold, N.J., come off as oddly generic. The book begins, rather melodramatically, with the 1927 death of young Virginia Springsteen, who would have been the singer’s aunt, in a traffic accident, and proceeds, paint-by-numbers style, through Springsteen’s troubled relationship with his depressive father, his eccentric upbringing in the “topsy-turvy environment” of his grandparents’ home where he spent much of his early life, his problems in school, and his almost inevitable identification with Elvis Presley when the hip-swiveling crooner changed rock ’n’ roll forever on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Part of the problem in these early chapters is that by working so closely with Springsteen, who is quoted liberally throughout the text, Carlin defaults to his subject’s version of events, which tends to tread lightly around the privacy and feelings of his family. A bigger problem is that Carlin, a former People magazine staffer who has written biographies of The Beatles’sPaul McCartney and The Beach Boys’sBrian Wilson, has little feel for working-class life and resorts to gauzy sentimentality where good, straight reportage would suffice.

The biggest problem with this part of the book, though, is how unsurprising it all is. Show me a talented musician who had a happy, stable childhood, and I’ll show you a kid who went to Julliard and now plays violin in the symphony. The opening chapters of Bruce, with its misfit kid from the wrong side of the tracks who talks his mom into buying his first guitar on credit, read like a comic-book rock star creation myth, just the sort of pabulum peddled by People magazine writers when they want to explain to Middle America how some scruffy-looking bar band frontman came to write a song that everyone is suddenly humming. “Sometimes he played to the mirror,” Carlin reports breathlessly of the teenage Springsteen, “watching his hands on the guitar’s neck and reveling in the instrument’s potential to serve both as a shield against his shyness and a bright to carry him to the center of everything.”

The dullness of the early chapters makes the excellence of the rest of the book, which focuses on how the adult Springsteen battled his creative demons, the music industry, and fame itself to create music that is both true to his artistic vision and accessible to the broadest possible audience, all the more startling. Here, Springsteen’s commentary, which earlier acts as a buffer between the reader and the starker truths of his childhood, becomes invaluable, showing the singer as not merely a preternaturally gifted musician and bandleader but also as a canny judge of the delicate relationship between artist and audience. It doesn’t hurt that Carlin, who seems to view working-class life in mid-century America through a veil of liberal piety, has a crystal clear vision of how rock albums get made.

From the beginning, Springsteen was an uneasy amalgam of two distinct kinds of musicians: the bar-band bawler and the sensitive, bearded singer-songwriter. His first album, Greetings from Ashbury Park, N.J., with its word-drunk story-songs like “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirits in the Night,” emphasized the latter of these two, earning the then-scrawny, bearded Springsteen comparisons to Bob Dylan but disappointing sales. After a second album also failed to ignite, Springsteen faced the first of many do-or-die moments in his career. In short order, he fired the weakest links in the still-fledgling E Street Band, hired a new producer, and spent months obsessively writing and recording (and re-recording and re-re-recording) new songs. “He began to think of the album as a musical novel,” Carlin writes, “the individual songs fitting into a larger, unified story. And like a novel, the chapters — or songs, in this case — had to dovetail, contrast, and ultimately enhance one another.”

Still, after 14 months of work in the studio, six of those months recording the title single alone, when Springsteen heard the first acetate recording of the completed album, he hated it so much, Carlin reports, that “he jumped to his feet, snatched the acetate from the turntable, and stalked out to the hotel courtyard, where he flung it into the swimming pool.” But after several panicky phone calls and a late-night drive back to New York City from rural Pennsylvania where his band was then touring, “Bruce shrugged of the last six torturous hours with a wave of the hand. ‘Then again,’ he said, ‘let’s just let it ride.’”

A month later, Columbia Records released the album recorded on that acetate as Born to Run, Springsteen’s breakout album, which peaked at #3 on the charts and put the scruffy bar rat on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week. The single he had labored so many months on became his first Top 40 hit, and, all these years later, its signature line, “Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run,” is still bawled out by bar-band wannabes the world over.

When Born to Run came out I was nine years old, and later on, with my teenage head full of British blues-rock from the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Who, Springsteen didn’t appear on my musical radar until Born in the U.S.A. made him unavoidable in 1984. Like most of America, I missed the angry political undertones of the title track and saw only the cheesy, made-for-MTV image of newly buff and clean-shaven Bruce doing the white-man shuffle onstage with pre-FriendsCourteney Cox in the “Dancing in the Dark” video.

The whole thing seemed so cornball and jingoistic that for the next decade or so I turned the dial whenever a Springsteen song came on the radio, until by chance a girlfriend lent me the 1996 compilation CD of songs inspired by the movie Dead Man Walking, which kicks off with Springsteen’s haunting title track. On the advice of this same girlfriend, I ran out and bought Springsteen’s Nebraska, which remains one of my favorite albums to this day.

So for me, a relative latecomer to the mythos of Bruce Springsteen, it came as something of a shock to learn that many of the bombastic, Jersey head-banger tunes on Born in the U.S.A. emerged from the same burst of songwriting creativity that produced the spare, ghostly compositions on Nebraska. In fact, as Carlin reports — and, surely, as any halfway serious Springsteen head already knows — many of the songs from both albums originated in demo recordings Springsteen and his guitar tech, Mike Batlin, made in a single marathon session in the singer’s bedroom, which Springsteen then copied onto a blank tape cassette he’d bought at a drug store.

Some of the songs from that long night in Springsteen’s bedroom, including “Born in the U.S.A.” itself, were re-recorded with the entire E Street Band playing at full, synth-blaring volume. Others, though, didn’t work as well with the full band, and after a few days trying to recapture the intimacy of the original demo recording, Springsteen turned to his sound engineer Toby Scott, and, pulling out the original cassette he’d been carrying around in his pocket for weeks, said: “Tobe, can we master a record off of this thing?” After painstakingly fixing the recording mistakes his boss had made, Scott managed to do exactly that, and the result was released as Nebraska. Then, having released one of the most quietly disturbing records in the annals of popular music, Springsteen went back to work with his band creating the album that would forever fix him in the cultural firmament as America’s blue-collar heartthrob.

This is all the stuff of rock legend, and while Bruce is too often a workmanlike affair, Carlin does a fine job of showing how the shifting winds of intra-band personalities and music-business realpolitik shaped the music that helped shaped a generation of American musical history. For the most part, though, one comes away from Bruce happy that Carlin had the good sense to get out of the way and just let Bruce be Bruce. The man could be a cad, especially to women, and his treatment of his bandmates, many of whom starved along with him in the early years, is at times callous, but overall Springsteen comes across as one of those rare great talents who is genuinely comfortable in his own skin.

That magic night in January 1982 when he sang the songs of his two best albums, Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A., into a home taping system in his bedroom is clearly the high water mark of Springsteen’s career, but reading Bruce one is impressed by how in the decades since he has avoided the fate that befalls so many aging rockers who end up touring as tribute bands of their younger selves. “I was always interested about how do I take this music and bring in adult concerns without losing its vitality, fun, and youthfulness,” he tells Carlin, speaking of the years after his greatest success in the mid-1980s:

So I thought, okay, we’re growing up together, me and my audience. And I took that idea seriously. So my usefulness as a thirty-eight-year-old is gonna be different than my usefulness as a twenty-seven-year-old. And I was always looking for ways to be useful.

In the nearly 30 years since Born in the U.S.A.. Springsteen has reinvented himself in album after album, now a poet able to see through the eyes of a man dying of AIDS in “Streets of Philadelphia,” now a national healer singing the soul-stirring “The Rising” after the 9/11 attacks, now a friend of presidents who lends his reputation as a straight-shooting spokesman for the working class to help elect a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

One of the most harrowing things about reading is having to finish a book in order to start another. It’s a necessary evil, to use a cliche, because in order to start a book we have already perceived as being worthy of reading we must first finish the one we are currently on. Bittersweet is the word that comes to mind, as in “yes, they are sweet things, the book I’m reading and the book I’m looking forward to reading, but it’s so incredibly bitter that I can’t read both at once.”Do other people think like this?So please imagine my situation. Here I am, enjoying and nearly finished with The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs, a book that I’m very impressed with in the way that I was impressed with the newest Coldplay album. By saying that, I mean I’m fascinated and incredibly pleased with a book that is marketed to the public, a book that would rarely make anyone’s short-lists simply because it’s not an act of literary genius, but it’s still very good all the same, as Coldplay’s X&Y was not an act of musical genius but was still a very good album and surprised many who thought the band would be resting on its laurels.But I digress; back to the situation. I’m enjoying this book very much etc., but looming on my bookshelf is Lorrie Moore’s Like Life, a collection of short stories that I’ve been meaning to read ever since my personal hero Nick Hornby admitted to stealing her style for the first few stories he ever wrote. Considering I had stolen Hornby’s idea for a book column on my blog earlier in the year, I felt a little closer to him – as if we were both caught doing something incredibly naughty and now can look back on it and laugh (and laugh and laugh.)So (and I hate to admit this) I actually rushed through the end of The Know-It-All, the book I was initially planning on choosing for the Book of the Month. I did it in the guise of squeezing Moore’s book into my column, but in reality I was doing it because the anticipation of Like Life was greater than the enjoyment of The Know-It-All. I sacrificed a pleasant and though-provoking post-completion period by opening Like Life mere minutes after finishing Jacobs’ book.Sorry, A.J. Your feat of reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica was impressive, but Lorrie Moore pushed it out of the way like a bully in the lunch line.Here’s what I think about Lorrie Moore: she’s brilliant. She’s a great writer. She’s supplanted NPR-whore David Sedaris as my favorite short-story author.It’s all because of how she writes, I think. It’s simple. She uses words that aren’t usually put together, but should be. She writes as if she was thinking for the people, as if each of the relationships in question would be better off if they would listen to reason but would never bow to those conventions. Each of her characters exudes a complicated set of characteristics that are all brought to the surface in the confining space of a few pages.This is the real test of a great short story author. How much can you describe a situation – the entire scope of an era – in the few pages allotted? The talent of Lorrie Moore is that she can get us all to appreciate the history and the emotions of a relationship in just the first few pages, and can get us to continue on with the story in our heads even after the final sentence.Additionally, Moore captures the spirit of New York City. In every story I feel as though I’ve just traveled through the seedier parts of Brooklyn – a feeling I usually get only after watching Law and Order – and it heightens my desire to visit. Moore, while not as widely known as she should be, could do well writing for the New York City tourism board. Well, as long as the tourism board was looking to cater to the despondent women who love men that they shouldn’t because they don’t know any better; the women who, in order to stop thinking about these men, wander through the streets of New York City to keep their mind off of their mistakes. Or something like that.I could continue gushing, but I’ll stop with this: God, I love Lorrie Moore. Hornby picked a good one to focus on, I’d say, and quite possibly some of it could trickle down to me. Rarely does an author make me rethink the way I want to write, but Moore did that. She helped me see the light of the short story, the idea that there’s nothing wrong with being short and concise. Hell, even Steinbeck, he of the 700 page epic, wrote short stories every once in a while. Thanks, Lorrie.And if I steal your style, blame Nick.- Corey VilhauerBlack Marks on Wood PulpJanuary 2006 CVBoMC